‘My place’ consists of an average sized room at the back of the garage. This means that the half of the garage that connects to my room acts as a kind of lounge room and sound barrier, making my room an almost silent oasis. It also means that my room has very little natural light, aside from the small amount that enters through my skylight that is located over my bed. For this reason I wanted to explore artificial in contrast with natural light through the way it reflects off of certain objects in my place. I want to explore how this causes segregation and compare it alongside light.

Artificial light representing isolation and natural light representing inclusion.

My room has three different sets of lights each with different tones. I intentionally took images of the same or similar things (one example being my bedroom wall) exposing it to these various lights. This places particular focus on the way artificial light attempts to mimic natural light through the varying tones and shadows.

The use of film helped me explore and communicate light and its movements. It allowed me to discover the way natural light moves in comparison to artificial light. Natural light has softer tones it moves on its own as well as with external objects (such as my moving garage door). Artificial light is very controlled; although in some ways it mimics this natural movement (e.g. the way my bathroom light gradually gets brighter and brighter, just as the sun does in the morning.) it has the ability to be controlled instantaneously.

I also wanted to explore the notion of silence and acoustics in my place. I have done this by recording sounds such as my fan, my shower, the microwave and various other sounds that focus less on the subject being recorded (e.g. my fan) and more on the space that it is in. This allows the listener to get a sense of the size of the place, the amount of things in the place and the kind of things in my place (soft surfaces or hard surfaces). Through these recordings I was hoping to make obvious the separation of the space of my room (that has softer surfaces) from my garage (that has harder surfaces) by the way the sounds bounce around my space.

One aspect of this task that I struggled with was creating one point to focus on. There was so much that I wanted to explore throughout my whole home but I was unable to, due to the fact that that there was too much. I wanted to explore the separation between the upstairs and downstairs but this became too broad and I had too much content. It was at this point that I decided to focus only on my area.

 This task really benefited me in the way that I was able to construct a strong theme for light, darkness, movements and sound. I attempted to create a correlation between my visual elements and my audio elements through the use of the outside recordings and the garage door closing. By doing so I wanted to portray the notion of segregation and use this element as a link between light and darkness vs. isolation and inclusion.